You aren't being too harsh. You're being an idiot.
NASA has always been aware of the risks of space flight. So have the astronauts who went into orbit, as well as to the moon. Man has always taken risk (had balls, as you so delicately put it) to push the frontier a little further away.
Just because the media has duped sheep such as yourself into believing that space is too dangerous and NASA needs massive reforms doesn't mean that the majority of people feel that way. That's one reason that there isn't a single astronaut who has called for reform of the space program. Any one of them would've been willing to give up their life to accomplish what they did.
You're missing the big picture here (and I actually disagree with the grandparent--Vonage should be sued over this issue).
That's great that it was really clear to you that 911 was going to work differently. Unfortunately for you, the person who finds you incapacitated might not realize that 911 doesn't work the same way on your "phone" as it does on every other phone that they've ever used. And given that people are not always in the clearest state of mind during emergencies, it might take a little longer for them to get emergency personnel to your location. When *you're* the one bleeding out and 5 minutes makes a difference between life and death, are you going to take comfort in the fact that Vonage may deliver your phone call to the non-emergency police numbers?
Did you know that any cell phone that can talk to a tower is *required* to be able to call 911, even if the person doesn't actually pay for service? Did you know the same thing is true for a phone that you have plugged into the wall? Why is Vonage any different then any other phone service provider (cell or landline?) The answer is, they're not. Or at least they cannot claim to be. You cannot claim to be a replacement for a phone company if you don't provide all of the critical services that a phone company would provide. It's false advertising. And it's not in the public's best interests.
Personal responsibility is NOT the issue here. Personal responsibility is when YOU take responsibility for your actions (as you did when you put your name on your post). Not when someone else takes responsibility for their actions. How could the girl's actions have been better? Could she have told the intruders to take responsibility for themselves? That's utter stupidity.
Furthermore, it's not even the little girl that is suing Vonage here. It's the state of Texas. And they're suing because of the reasons I just indicated. Offering a replacement for phone service and not giving 911 services is utterly ludicrous.
Try IARSN TaskInfo for a process list program. It's really good, and shareware ($35). I believe it used to be freeware, you might try older versions as well.
I actually used to use that program from time to time at work to try to debug runaway processes. Very nifty.
There's a few pieces of information here that you're missing, I figured I'd drop in my $0.02.
while overdraw is a major hurdle for traditional 3d cards. Not lately (as of geForce5K+). There are two very tried-and-true methods of getting around this. One is to lay down a depth-only pass first, which allows the hardware to render at ~2x the normal polygon throughput (which is pretty much infinite at this point anyways), and then reject the hidden color pixels *before shading ever occurs*. Also, there is *a staggering* amount of area devoted to doing z rejection in the most efficient manner possible. A rough front-to-back sort of all non alpha-blended objects will generally result in very good performance in terms of z-complexity. Overdraw is very rarely a problem on modern hardware, or at least it's not a problem that developers cannot address.
Flexible and robust realistic reflection and refraction is solely in the domain of ray tracing Only in your limited view of how to perform reflection / refraction / diffraction effects. There are actually quite effective techniques that allow someone to perform fairly accurate reflections and refractions through an arbitrary object at an arbitrary location. It's all about cube-map lookups and scene management.
Plus you're missing the very large problem with raytracing. Whereas typical 3-D rendering techniques are marginally dependent on viewport size (depending on their specific data set), raytracing is *completely* bound by the number of pixels that have to be displayed. 640x480 is half as bad as 800x600. 1600x1200 is four times worse then that. Anti-aliasing is *4 times* worse then that. Whereas going from 1024x768 to 1600x1200 with 4xAA in a traditional rendering platform is dependent on the data set, in terms of raytracing the problem is *automatically* 10 times harder on raytracing, EVEN IF YOUR SCENE IS EMPTY.
That's what everyone who has their panties in a bunch doesn't seem to get. Apple is not seeking these individuals in order to punish *them.* It's to find out who their sources are, and who their sources are, and who leaked the information. That way the person who *did* violate the NDA can be punished properly.
Seriously, why don't people get that? It's not that hard.
You have freedom of speech. You're not going to be imprisoned or tortured for what you say. On the other hand, you can be fired from your job. Your s/o might leave you. Your kids might hate you. You might blow through your entire life savings unable to get another job.
It bears repeating, in BOLD. Freedom of speech is not a license to do something illegal, unethical, or even for you to say things otherwise inappropriate for a person of your particular position in society.
Seriously... I've spent a very significant amount of time optimizing four shipped titles now--mostly games, one commercial shrinkwrap application--for both speed and size tradeoffs.
The big annoying thing with optimization is that assuming you are working with talented people (I believe the people who work on GNOME are talented), there is generally little low-hanging fruit. An example of low hanging fruit is places where you are using--for example--a vector, but you should be using a map or a hash table. Another example is places where complex code can be skipped over by checking some preconditions and bailing early.
Although premature optimization is the root of all evil, most of us recognize these sorts of places early, and do the relevant optimization work in the first place. What you're left with in terms of optimizations is places where your initial architecture is *just wrong.* This kind of performance / memory deficiency really sucks, because most of the time the code is too complex and there are too many other dependent pieces of code to do the necessary rewrite.
The other thing that makes optimization work hard is (lack of) tools. There are basically two types of problems you can optimize: speed and size. Sometimes you get lucky, and fixing size problems *also* increase speed (generally because your smaller code now fits in the instruction cache, or because your data memory fits in the L1 or L2), but that is usually the exception. With size problems, the best bet is usually to make all objects pooled individually. This allows you to dump out information during the program run as to how many objects you've allocated of a particular class, as well as how much memory they're taking up.
With speed concerns, it's a little more difficult. There are basically two types of speed problems. Problems that occur constantly, and problems that occur as a result of user interaction or are themselves cyclical. Effectively it's a matter of identifying spikes versus identifying plateaus. Plateuas are the easier of the two, because they are identifiable via tools like Intel's VTune (which has been--I believe--ported to Linux by Intel). But spikes are harder, in that identifying them requires code instrumentation, and although there are some suites that will do it automatically, they often over instrument places which lead to artificial spiking.
Anyhoo, sorry for rambling... optimization is something very near and dear to my heart.
Actually there's an even simpler method to generate "reasonably" random numbers.
You simply repeatedly ask the CPU for the current instruction number (RTDSC) some number of times, and add the deltas. Because of thread switches--which are indirectly based on user interactions and are directly based on the processes that are running--this number is not psuedorandom, although it is (very nearly) impossible to predict.
It is, of course, not truly random either (or more correctly, it closely will fit to a normal distribution in the long run for some number of processes running and some amount of user interaction).
Hmm, actually this sounds like a good research topic.:-)
today i read this horrible article by this horrible little man / he said that bloggers were going to ruin the world becuz of our poor speeling and capitiliziziaiation / what do ppl like him no n e wayz?
Actually what you're stating also isn't what happened.
In your example, his bid of $201.00 only loses him the top slot, because it is within the same increment as the current high bid. Not only that, but now HE IS NOT THE TOP BIDDER, because his later bid supercedes his earlier one.
When he bumps his bid to $205, he becomes the top bidder again at $202.50, which is the next increment.
Again, this is the same behavior that would occur for proxy bidders at a physical auction house.
I mentioned this in another post, but it bears repeating. eBay is--first and foremost--an auction house.
They behave like other auction houses do, and increase bids in an incremental fashion. This prevents ninja-bidders at the last second from bidding pennies more then someone else and winning the auction. (Imagine that you're bidding on a 4.1M dollar house, and someone comes in with 0.01 seconds to go and bids $4,100,000.01).
This practice is NOTHING NEW. Where eBay had to modernize the concept was the fact that everyone is a proxy bidder on their site, no one is bidding in person. This means that they follow the other rules that auction houses follow, which is that when two proxy bids are registered for the same amount, the first person whose proxy bid arrives gets the bid, and the other person has already been outbid.
This is effectively the same thing that would happen were one to visit an actual, honest-to-God auction house. Two people would raise their paddles at the same time. The auctioneer would pick one of them (probably the one whom he sees first), and would accept a bid from them. The other person would either then keep their paddle up for the next bid increment, or they would put it down because that really was the highest dollar amount they were willing to pay.
Ignorance of how auctions work shouldn't entitle one to any amount of payout in a lawsuit. It should entitle one to a swift "ha ha" and a kick in the pants for wasting the rest of our time.
Just because eBay does it online doesn't mean they shouldn't respect the tried and true method of bidding in increments. Otherwise people would get very snarked as someone goes in and outbids them by pennies everytime.
Bidding in increments has been around auctions since the 1700s. Why should eBay do it any differently?
Raytracing is not something I see getting big in the gaming arena any time soon.
Why? Resolution! Ray-tracing is a 'hard' problem. When tracing a particular element of the viewable area, the scene complexity and number of bounces allowed dictate how long that particular trace will take.
However, the number of elements in the screen is proportional to the resolution of the display. 640x480 is half as bad as 800x600. And 1600x1200 is four times worse then that.
Re:don't have TiVo... Yet
on
Can TiVo be Saved?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I can wait for it all to come together, I know how to program my VCR.
That's great that you know how to program your VCR.
Please set up your VCR to record only first-run episodes of Law & Order that come on NBC, and all episodes that come on TNT. Oh, but don't record an episode if you've recorded in the previous 30 days. And please make sure to automatically have your VCR keep up with the scheduling, so that when NBC decides to start adding one extra minute to the show to throw of your VCR, it records the extra minute as well. Oh, and if the Simpsons comes on at the same time as any of those episodes on TNT, please record those instead. And when the network delays the start of Law and Order because the baseball game went long, please make sure to have your VCR pick up on that as well. Oh, and given that I like Law and Order, could you please set up your VCR to record other shows that it feels I might be interested in.
People who make the argument that Tivo is just a smarter VCR completely miss the point. They're akin to the people who assume that any article that begins with 'Bill Gates donated $1B to help immunize people in third world countries' must end with 'in a bid to avoid paying taxes.'
Tivo is not just a smart VCR. It's not missing shows that you want to watch. It's watching your shows in 21 minutes per 30 minutes recorded. It's keeping track of schedule changes. It's coming home late at night and watching *whatever the hell you want to.*
But look on the bright side. Assuming that this (like every other doomsday article to come out about Tivo in the last five years) is correct, you can rest assured that you didn't waste any money on bending TV to your will. Me? I'm glad to have given $500 to a company who makes a great product, and I wish them the greatest success.
No, that's *not* how patents work. Patents apply to *exactly* what they say they apply to.
In this case, Microsoft is trying to patent the IsNot operator in Basic-like languages. If granted (unlikely, but possible), then they will have a patent on the operator IsNot, in Basic-like languages. They will not have a patent on '!=' in Basic. They will not have a patent on cmp in Assembly. They will not have a patent on an 'IsNot' operator in C++.
They *will* be able to sue any other compiler vendor who attempts to add the instruction IsNot to their Basic parser. This has no implications on AMD's or Intel's licensing relationship with Microsoft.
While I agree that this is a pretty worthless patent (because if they get it, people will simply avoid using the IsNot operator in favor of other, more platform-indepent methods of comparison), I don't find this to be the greatest evil of the century. As a previous poster said, this is likely a case of someone in management telling the team to patent everything they could. In lots of software, companies try to patent everything they can about their software. They'll literally submit dozens or hundreds of patents about their software. It's sortof like throwing crap against the wall, and seeing what of it sticks.
IANALBIDHSP. (I am not a lawyer, but I do hold several patents).
Gee, that's funny. All of my SCSI drives (6 of them) have been functioning flawlessy since my cutover to SP2. If you read what the MS Engineer is actually saying in context, you'll see that he's actually saying that you should not use any legacy devices for XP or post-XP that don't have proper drivers written for them.
Is it Microsoft's fault that Nikon hasn't updated their drivers for that particular scanner in over 4 years?
In fact, the only problem I've had with SP2 is the extra little icon sitting in my system tray.
He's just doing his job, which is getting his client off the hook.
No he isn't. He isn't a lawyer for the kid, or the kid's family. He's a lawyer for the victims' families, and this is a civil suit.
I suspect what's really going on here is that a lawyer with an agenda has convinced grieving families of victims that big media is to blame for their loss. He's trying to shutdown violent video games, like he tried to shutdown gangster rap before that and Madonna before even that.
However, Jack Thompson has tried this before. He's failed every time. I'm confident that he will fail again this time.
PLEASE. Stop making excuses for people who have to work in college.
I (and all of my friends in college) worked 20-30 hours a week, and took 15-18 hours per semester for four years. (Plus 6-9 hours per summer session, and fulltime employment at the same time).
I also maintained a 3.9 GPA and am *very* successful at what I do. As are my friends.
If you didn't get the grades you thought you'd get in college, look towards yourself. Stop blaming others, or talking about how it was too hard or impossible because you had to work. If you gave me that crap at a job interview, I'd kindly show you the door.
Texas Instruments did the same thing to the state of Texas less then a year ago. Except that instead of threatening to close a plant, it "convinced" Texas to give it $135M to increase the budget of the University of Texas at Dallas significantly. UTD is getting a new research facility out of the deal.
Actually one of the coolest uses of blackmail ever, IMHO. (And not just because UTD is my alma mater, either.)
Slashdot Mirror
You aren't being too harsh. You're being an idiot.
NASA has always been aware of the risks of space flight. So have the astronauts who went into orbit, as well as to the moon. Man has always taken risk (had balls, as you so delicately put it) to push the frontier a little further away.
Just because the media has duped sheep such as yourself into believing that space is too dangerous and NASA needs massive reforms doesn't mean that the majority of people feel that way. That's one reason that there isn't a single astronaut who has called for reform of the space program. Any one of them would've been willing to give up their life to accomplish what they did.
You're missing the big picture here (and I actually disagree with the grandparent--Vonage should be sued over this issue).
That's great that it was really clear to you that 911 was going to work differently. Unfortunately for you, the person who finds you incapacitated might not realize that 911 doesn't work the same way on your "phone" as it does on every other phone that they've ever used. And given that people are not always in the clearest state of mind during emergencies, it might take a little longer for them to get emergency personnel to your location. When *you're* the one bleeding out and 5 minutes makes a difference between life and death, are you going to take comfort in the fact that Vonage may deliver your phone call to the non-emergency police numbers?
Did you know that any cell phone that can talk to a tower is *required* to be able to call 911, even if the person doesn't actually pay for service? Did you know the same thing is true for a phone that you have plugged into the wall? Why is Vonage any different then any other phone service provider (cell or landline?) The answer is, they're not. Or at least they cannot claim to be. You cannot claim to be a replacement for a phone company if you don't provide all of the critical services that a phone company would provide. It's false advertising. And it's not in the public's best interests.
Personal responsibility is NOT the issue here. Personal responsibility is when YOU take responsibility for your actions (as you did when you put your name on your post). Not when someone else takes responsibility for their actions. How could the girl's actions have been better? Could she have told the intruders to take responsibility for themselves? That's utter stupidity.
Furthermore, it's not even the little girl that is suing Vonage here. It's the state of Texas. And they're suing because of the reasons I just indicated. Offering a replacement for phone service and not giving 911 services is utterly ludicrous.
So was EA a few years back. I'm not kidding.
Although I couldn't find a source, I worked at the company when Larry Probst sent around the article.
I believe it was in Fortune 500 or Forbes.
Try IARSN TaskInfo for a process list program. It's really good, and shareware ($35). I believe it used to be freeware, you might try older versions as well.
I actually used to use that program from time to time at work to try to debug runaway processes. Very nifty.
There's a few pieces of information here that you're missing, I figured I'd drop in my $0.02.
while overdraw is a major hurdle for traditional 3d cards.
Not lately (as of geForce5K+). There are two very tried-and-true methods of getting around this. One is to lay down a depth-only pass first, which allows the hardware to render at ~2x the normal polygon throughput (which is pretty much infinite at this point anyways), and then reject the hidden color pixels *before shading ever occurs*. Also, there is *a staggering* amount of area devoted to doing z rejection in the most efficient manner possible. A rough front-to-back sort of all non alpha-blended objects will generally result in very good performance in terms of z-complexity. Overdraw is very rarely a problem on modern hardware, or at least it's not a problem that developers cannot address.
Flexible and robust realistic reflection and refraction is solely in the domain of ray tracing
Only in your limited view of how to perform reflection / refraction / diffraction effects. There are actually quite effective techniques that allow someone to perform fairly accurate reflections and refractions through an arbitrary object at an arbitrary location. It's all about cube-map lookups and scene management.
Plus you're missing the very large problem with raytracing. Whereas typical 3-D rendering techniques are marginally dependent on viewport size (depending on their specific data set), raytracing is *completely* bound by the number of pixels that have to be displayed. 640x480 is half as bad as 800x600. 1600x1200 is four times worse then that. Anti-aliasing is *4 times* worse then that. Whereas going from 1024x768 to 1600x1200 with 4xAA in a traditional rendering platform is dependent on the data set, in terms of raytracing the problem is *automatically* 10 times harder on raytracing, EVEN IF YOUR SCENE IS EMPTY.
Yikes.
In other news, women frown on D&D, by disallowing players access to their sensitive areas...
God! Finally someone said it right.
That's what everyone who has their panties in a bunch doesn't seem to get. Apple is not seeking these individuals in order to punish *them.* It's to find out who their sources are, and who their sources are, and who leaked the information. That way the person who *did* violate the NDA can be punished properly.
Try the whitepapers here.
They have very good info, and little-to-no marketting BS.
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up to +1000000.
Seriously, why don't people get that? It's not that hard.
You have freedom of speech. You're not going to be imprisoned or tortured for what you say. On the other hand, you can be fired from your job. Your s/o might leave you. Your kids might hate you. You might blow through your entire life savings unable to get another job.
It bears repeating, in BOLD. Freedom of speech is not a license to do something illegal, unethical, or even for you to say things otherwise inappropriate for a person of your particular position in society.
when they arbitrarily decided to destroy the Hubble telescope
Woah, easy there big fella. It wasn't NASA that wanted to let the Hubble degrade, it was a direct reuslt of the directive and pressing of the Dub.
Given that the man has final approval over NASA's budget, their collective hands are effectively tied.
Seriously... I've spent a very significant amount of time optimizing four shipped titles now--mostly games, one commercial shrinkwrap application--for both speed and size tradeoffs.
The big annoying thing with optimization is that assuming you are working with talented people (I believe the people who work on GNOME are talented), there is generally little low-hanging fruit. An example of low hanging fruit is places where you are using--for example--a vector, but you should be using a map or a hash table. Another example is places where complex code can be skipped over by checking some preconditions and bailing early.
Although premature optimization is the root of all evil, most of us recognize these sorts of places early, and do the relevant optimization work in the first place. What you're left with in terms of optimizations is places where your initial architecture is *just wrong.* This kind of performance / memory deficiency really sucks, because most of the time the code is too complex and there are too many other dependent pieces of code to do the necessary rewrite.
The other thing that makes optimization work hard is (lack of) tools. There are basically two types of problems you can optimize: speed and size. Sometimes you get lucky, and fixing size problems *also* increase speed (generally because your smaller code now fits in the instruction cache, or because your data memory fits in the L1 or L2), but that is usually the exception. With size problems, the best bet is usually to make all objects pooled individually. This allows you to dump out information during the program run as to how many objects you've allocated of a particular class, as well as how much memory they're taking up.
With speed concerns, it's a little more difficult. There are basically two types of speed problems. Problems that occur constantly, and problems that occur as a result of user interaction or are themselves cyclical. Effectively it's a matter of identifying spikes versus identifying plateaus. Plateuas are the easier of the two, because they are identifiable via tools like Intel's VTune (which has been--I believe--ported to Linux by Intel). But spikes are harder, in that identifying them requires code instrumentation, and although there are some suites that will do it automatically, they often over instrument places which lead to artificial spiking.
Anyhoo, sorry for rambling... optimization is something very near and dear to my heart.
There really is no excuse for *not* having a good OSS Flash player to be quite frank.
SWF (the file format which flash plays) is open.
Actually there's an even simpler method to generate "reasonably" random numbers.
:-)
You simply repeatedly ask the CPU for the current instruction number (RTDSC) some number of times, and add the deltas. Because of thread switches--which are indirectly based on user interactions and are directly based on the processes that are running--this number is not psuedorandom, although it is (very nearly) impossible to predict.
It is, of course, not truly random either (or more correctly, it closely will fit to a normal distribution in the long run for some number of processes running and some amount of user interaction).
Hmm, actually this sounds like a good research topic.
today i read this horrible article by this horrible little man / he said that bloggers were going to ruin the world becuz of our poor speeling and capitiliziziaiation / what do ppl like him no n e wayz?
Actually what you're stating also isn't what happened.
In your example, his bid of $201.00 only loses him the top slot, because it is within the same increment as the current high bid. Not only that, but now HE IS NOT THE TOP BIDDER, because his later bid supercedes his earlier one.
When he bumps his bid to $205, he becomes the top bidder again at $202.50, which is the next increment.
Again, this is the same behavior that would occur for proxy bidders at a physical auction house.
I mentioned this in another post, but it bears repeating. eBay is--first and foremost--an auction house.
They behave like other auction houses do, and increase bids in an incremental fashion. This prevents ninja-bidders at the last second from bidding pennies more then someone else and winning the auction. (Imagine that you're bidding on a 4.1M dollar house, and someone comes in with 0.01 seconds to go and bids $4,100,000.01).
This practice is NOTHING NEW. Where eBay had to modernize the concept was the fact that everyone is a proxy bidder on their site, no one is bidding in person. This means that they follow the other rules that auction houses follow, which is that when two proxy bids are registered for the same amount, the first person whose proxy bid arrives gets the bid, and the other person has already been outbid.
This is effectively the same thing that would happen were one to visit an actual, honest-to-God auction house. Two people would raise their paddles at the same time. The auctioneer would pick one of them (probably the one whom he sees first), and would accept a bid from them. The other person would either then keep their paddle up for the next bid increment, or they would put it down because that really was the highest dollar amount they were willing to pay.
Ignorance of how auctions work shouldn't entitle one to any amount of payout in a lawsuit. It should entitle one to a swift "ha ha" and a kick in the pants for wasting the rest of our time.
Actually, that is commonly accepted auctioning practice, according to any number of well-known and very reputable auction houses.
Just because eBay does it online doesn't mean they shouldn't respect the tried and true method of bidding in increments. Otherwise people would get very snarked as someone goes in and outbids them by pennies everytime.
Bidding in increments has been around auctions since the 1700s. Why should eBay do it any differently?
Raytracing is not something I see getting big in the gaming arena any time soon.
Why? Resolution! Ray-tracing is a 'hard' problem. When tracing a particular element of the viewable area, the scene complexity and number of bounces allowed dictate how long that particular trace will take.
However, the number of elements in the screen is proportional to the resolution of the display. 640x480 is half as bad as 800x600. And 1600x1200 is four times worse then that.
That's great that you know how to program your VCR.
Please set up your VCR to record only first-run episodes of Law & Order that come on NBC, and all episodes that come on TNT. Oh, but don't record an episode if you've recorded in the previous 30 days. And please make sure to automatically have your VCR keep up with the scheduling, so that when NBC decides to start adding one extra minute to the show to throw of your VCR, it records the extra minute as well. Oh, and if the Simpsons comes on at the same time as any of those episodes on TNT, please record those instead. And when the network delays the start of Law and Order because the baseball game went long, please make sure to have your VCR pick up on that as well. Oh, and given that I like Law and Order, could you please set up your VCR to record other shows that it feels I might be interested in.
People who make the argument that Tivo is just a smarter VCR completely miss the point. They're akin to the people who assume that any article that begins with 'Bill Gates donated $1B to help immunize people in third world countries' must end with 'in a bid to avoid paying taxes.'
Tivo is not just a smart VCR. It's not missing shows that you want to watch. It's watching your shows in 21 minutes per 30 minutes recorded. It's keeping track of schedule changes. It's coming home late at night and watching *whatever the hell you want to.*
But look on the bright side. Assuming that this (like every other doomsday article to come out about Tivo in the last five years) is correct, you can rest assured that you didn't waste any money on bending TV to your will. Me? I'm glad to have given $500 to a company who makes a great product, and I wish them the greatest success.
No, that's *not* how patents work. Patents apply to *exactly* what they say they apply to.
In this case, Microsoft is trying to patent the IsNot operator in Basic-like languages. If granted (unlikely, but possible), then they will have a patent on the operator IsNot, in Basic-like languages. They will not have a patent on '!=' in Basic. They will not have a patent on cmp in Assembly. They will not have a patent on an 'IsNot' operator in C++.
They *will* be able to sue any other compiler vendor who attempts to add the instruction IsNot to their Basic parser. This has no implications on AMD's or Intel's licensing relationship with Microsoft.
While I agree that this is a pretty worthless patent (because if they get it, people will simply avoid using the IsNot operator in favor of other, more platform-indepent methods of comparison), I don't find this to be the greatest evil of the century. As a previous poster said, this is likely a case of someone in management telling the team to patent everything they could. In lots of software, companies try to patent everything they can about their software. They'll literally submit dozens or hundreds of patents about their software. It's sortof like throwing crap against the wall, and seeing what of it sticks.
IANALBIDHSP. (I am not a lawyer, but I do hold several patents).
Gee, that's funny. All of my SCSI drives (6 of them) have been functioning flawlessy since my cutover to SP2. If you read what the MS Engineer is actually saying in context, you'll see that he's actually saying that you should not use any legacy devices for XP or post-XP that don't have proper drivers written for them.
Is it Microsoft's fault that Nikon hasn't updated their drivers for that particular scanner in over 4 years?
In fact, the only problem I've had with SP2 is the extra little icon sitting in my system tray.
No he isn't. He isn't a lawyer for the kid, or the kid's family. He's a lawyer for the victims' families, and this is a civil suit.
I suspect what's really going on here is that a lawyer with an agenda has convinced grieving families of victims that big media is to blame for their loss. He's trying to shutdown violent video games, like he tried to shutdown gangster rap before that and Madonna before even that.
However, Jack Thompson has tried this before. He's failed every time. I'm confident that he will fail again this time.
The real question I have is when the OSI goes and trademarks "Open Source," how is the slashdot community going to respond?
Open Source(tm)
PLEASE. Stop making excuses for people who have to work in college.
I (and all of my friends in college) worked 20-30 hours a week, and took 15-18 hours per semester for four years. (Plus 6-9 hours per summer session, and fulltime employment at the same time).
I also maintained a 3.9 GPA and am *very* successful at what I do. As are my friends.
If you didn't get the grades you thought you'd get in college, look towards yourself. Stop blaming others, or talking about how it was too hard or impossible because you had to work. If you gave me that crap at a job interview, I'd kindly show you the door.
Yeah, honestly this isn't really that sleezy.
Texas Instruments did the same thing to the state of Texas less then a year ago. Except that instead of threatening to close a plant, it "convinced" Texas to give it $135M to increase the budget of the University of Texas at Dallas significantly. UTD is getting a new research facility out of the deal.
Actually one of the coolest uses of blackmail ever, IMHO. (And not just because UTD is my alma mater, either.)